Fourth of July Terror Plot and the Theater of the FBI

Why are they going out of their way to tell us that nothing happened?

I hate to be this cynical, but I've now lived through damned near 15 years of this stuff, so I'm not buying the rap wholesale any more. My government, and the people working in it, have found fear far too useful.

"I do believe our work disrupted efforts to kill people, likely in connection with July 4," Comey told reporters at FBI headquarters in Washington. Comey's comments are a public confirmation made by other law enforcement that several people were arrested in the past month over concerns that they might have been inspired by ISIS to carry out attacks either during the holiday or during the Muslim holy period of Ramadan.

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Bollocks. Coming hard on the heels of the news that, during the unrest in Baltimore, law-enforcement engaged in a fairly thorough disinformation campaign, I'm going to need a lot more than than Comey's word on this.

The FBI has arrested around a dozen people in the past four weeks, Comey said. "We made the arrests to thwart what we thought they were up to," he added. "Some of them were focused on the Fourth of July, and that's as specific as I can get." He declined to say how many of those arrested were planning to carry out attacks or to describe the nature of what they were planning.

Show me the evidence. Bring them all to trial. Until then, what is the point in telling us anything at all? If the attacks were thwarted, we really don't have to know about them, do we? Unless, of course, your point in releasing this information is to keep the fear level high enough so that you can aggrandize your own power a little more.

Some of those arrested, he said, had been using end-to-end encryption programs to communicate with ISIS. He warned Congress on Wednesday that it's becoming much harder for the FBI to track potential ISIS followers because of the growth in encryption technology.

According to what we are allowed to know about it, the U.S. intelligence budget for 2014 was somewhere around $70 billion. If we're spending that money and still can get outsmarted by angry teenagers, and some guys driving pick-up trucks around Syria, somebody needs to get fired in a hurry.

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